I have on my iPhone an app called the “ISS Spotter.”  It tells me exactly when and where in the sky the International Space Station will be.  As I write this, I just came back indoors having been alerted to the Station’s passage and indeed there it was, making its stately luminescent way overhead.  Being able to spot that space station as it arcs across the night sky has been an oddly strange comfort lately.  For it is exactly where it is supposed to be.  issGoverned by the laws of astrophysics, there is no ambiguity, no capriciousness as to when and where it will appear on its journey. 

I think it’s a comfort because my life and your life are so utterly unlike that now.  There’s so little predictability, so little consistency with what our lives were like only one short month ago.  So many of our routines have been upended and there seems so very little that we actually know as we anxiously await what may be next in this scary and unsettled time.  On this Palm Sunday, as Rev. Barbara Blaisdell says in her powerful Palm Sunday sermon, we once again begin our Holy Week journey, a journey that may seem the same as it has been in the past, but it’s not.  The uncertainties and unpredictabilities  that assail us right now, the worries, the fears about what’s next, the not knowing – unlike with that space station – exactly  what is coming next sap us and make us anxious and even immobilized.  Yet Jesus’ journey once again into Jerusalem can and should remind us that we can ask God to help us choose to refuse those things that are hurting us on this new and unknown journey, to ask God to help us from latching onto premature pseudo-certainties that do us and the world no good, and instead, in Barbara’s words, see this as “an opportunity to choose a new way, a new way of being. This is a week to see that a new way can be made. A way has been made. A way that leads to new life, abundant life for each and all.”  May this Palm Sunday indeed remind us Christ is always journeying with us and the whole world, always offering us that new way even in the midst of uncertainty and anxiety.  Thanks be to God for that Good News!